DB charset in CI 1.6.0

[eluser]dik_[/eluser]
The code in my first post is an extract from the DB.php file, which I have modified to include the penultimate line shown, in order for UTF8 to work for me.

I don't manually initialize the DB myself, I have it done automatically in application/config/autoload.php:

Code:

$autoload['libraries'] = array('database', ...);

Did some more testing, and removed the db from the autoloading array, manually loading it in my controller's constructor, as you suggested. Still, I get garbage characters instead of readable text, and still the same queries are ran (nothing related to setting the char set that is)...